Cemetery Rush Hour

My GP has told me to go for a little walk as often as I can, and the walk from my house to the high street to buy a newspaper it is as simple a one to achieve as any.

If I take the direct route it is a few minutes tops. But the walk itself is improved no end by a detour up a side street and through the church yard/cemetery. Not only is it less noisy than walking along an ‘A’ road but has just the thing I need to stretch Fibromyalgia and asthma alike … a short but steep hill!

Today I was happy to reach the top of the hill and pause to admire the view. Not just because it is beautiful, but also because it was somewhat of change to arrive there able to breathe. Happy to draw breath? Yes – because when I started this lark I was having to stop once I reached the brow of the hill and stand there for some minutes, clinging to the cemetery wall, and gasp for air! Merely breathless is a huge improvement…

Being a people-watcher my walking there as often as I am in recent weeks has also highlighted patterns in other people’s lives that had not occurred to me before.

When there was snow on the ground I hardly saw a soul (with or without a body attached to it). Today (tuesday) was misty and chilled, a real cemetery day I counted no less than eight people there. A few just walking like myself, most tending graves. At least they seemed corporeal enough; who can tell?

Eight may not seem many but it’s a small town. I wondered if Tuesday was, by some unspoken agreement, grave day. In which case I shall avoid them because I felt oddly ill at ease with the ‘crowds’.

Perhaps it is the writer in me – and the imminent publication of my ghost story collection Leinster Gardens and Other Subtleties – but I like my graveyards good and desolate, thanks all the same.